I'll recruit my army from the orphanages.

(From Bob Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain, on the 'Modern Times' album of 2006.)

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[It took me several days to figgure out that this post is really about the American mid-term elections. Do starfish notice when you cut off one of their legs? Probably. Maybe not. ... My only friend these days, a deaf guy at the library who sometimes says hello - he has a gizmo implanted in his brain that lets him hear and thus speak - laughs with me over the 700 votes that went to 'Dimitri The Lover' aka Dr. James Sears in the recent municipal election. ... The vision of America peddalling (officially) so strongly in reverse hits me harder than I want to admit. More on this when I've picked myself up a bit.] Peter Sinclair presents us (a year late but better late than never) with a video of Kevin Trenberth at the Seattle Science Festival. He gives us a limerick by Lynne Page: Deep Doo Doo There’s a clearer analysis forming Of the increase in powerful storming; But it’s not just hot air About which we should care For the cold ocean depths have been warming. This presentation of Kevin's is particularly good - an exemplar. Limericks connect with people and lighten things up. He could even go one further: asking the audience to compose clever doggerel to be passed forward to the stage on scraps of paper, and he could then read some of them at the end of his talk instead of indulging in another more-or-less hijacked Q&A session. He also mentions the strange usage of 'mitigate' to denote stoppage of CO2 and other GHG emissions. This pleases me because I think the word is seriously inappropriate and a stumbling block; have thought so since I first heard it used in this context and this is the first time I have heard somone else mention it, someone with authority. Maybe Naomi Oreskes can figgure out who started it? We've got all these environmentalists wringing their hands over being unable to communicate with the hoi polloi ... while they are using words like 'mitigate' to mean STOP. No surprise then that they are not getting across. It's scientists who serve up any certainty we have around the issue; but their class has given us nuclear power and genetic engineering as well so some ambivalence is understandable. They'll soon give us geo-engineering which will be the end of it. 14th century plague eliminated half of the population (according to Ian Mortimer in The Guardian). If Ebo-Lola can just get airborne we might even dis-evolve back to H. neanderthalensis in time for an idyllic couple'a billion years till the sun explodes. Enoch's Hammer in Spades! How can anyone have such thoughts eh? Or having them, put them out on a page? In public! Must be the fricken' Antichrist at work.

Décroissance!

"The truth shall set you free - after it has broken your heart." So says a wag on a Buddhist website I am looking at. A tweet or a twitter or something. It's very difficult to give up perquisites & emoluments - consumerism as they call it. Not a root cause such as are found among the more fundamental 0'th chakra pathologies - but a decent cause-and-effect linkage. Truth is the muggles will never willingly give up their silly & mediocre perks. Period. We're toasted! Tim Cook twitters while Rome burns: "Beyond serving as Apple's biggest profit center, the iPhone is also a bedrock of consumer spending and the stock market." Savour that phrase 'a bedrock of consumer spending'. It does not appear in the NYT article itself but in the web links leading there. It is part of whatever Google searches for so Google turns it up - as of this date at least. Now in this case I find that I have to step beyond Daphne's dictum ('Do not make principles of your incapacities.') because I have never been able to have a conversation on one of these things except to say "Please call me on a land line." Text messaging works OK I guess - provided you don't have much to say. What is the feminine equivalent of Bliss' punch line I wonder? Adding four inches to a vagina certainly isn't where it's at - tight pussies are preferred I believe. Riding on the streetcar there are just as many women using these phones in public as men. Everybody's got one - except me. What's the metric for a tight pussy I wonder? Coming back to the title of this post to finish up. I thought my own personal situation was about to suddenly and seriously slip into lining up at The Good Shepherd for a bed full of ticks. This has been averted at the 11th hour - an interesting story for another time. When I first begin to lift my head after Copenhagen - in the spring of 2010 - I attend a meeting at one of the churches drumming up trade for an Oikos event (mentioned here). At some point a crazy woman stands up and declaims on being unable to fully participate because the powers-that-be have stripped her of what she needs for a functioning identity - her children apparently. What strikes me is that she is permitted - and I think, "Wow! Here's real compassion in action! Toronto has evolved since my days at Rochdale!" I am mistaken of course, they are simply too repressed to shut her up. The last few weeks of looking up the barrel of homelessness reminds me of this incident, and Dylan's line gives it ... context. A simultaneous blockage in my drains is probably not connected. Be well.

 
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